FORMER soldier Anthony Gurney accidentally shot himself in the face - and was yesterday locked up for five years for illegally posessing a firearm.

The 37-year-old ended up with a .22 bullet in his jaw after dropping the home-made weapon in a North Wales village.

As he recovered in hospital, Gurney tried to concoct a story that he had been gunned down by a masked man.

But yesterday he was jailed for carrying the so-called DIY Maze Gun, which is just 21cm long and so short it could fit inside a pocket.

Mold Crown Court was told that one evening in January when the tiny but lethal weapon fell out of the ground and discharged itself, Gurney admitted to paramedics and police that he had accidentally shot himself. But that, said prosecutor Nicholas Williams, was when he thought he was dying.

When doctors gave him antibiotics and left the .22 bullet in his jaw, he concocted a story that he had been shot by someone else to try and get away with the fact that he had been found in possession of an unlawful weapon.

Gurney said that the gun was nothing to do with him, and that he was shot in the face by a man wearing a balaclava, as he removed his multi-gym from a trailer at the village of Penycae near Wrexham.

He even went as far as naming another man he believed may have been responsible for shooting him, and said that he had upset criminals by trying to prevent them supplying drugs to children and others on the estate.

But a jury rejected his explanation, convicted him of possessing the prohibited weapon, and he received the minimum five year prison sentence.

Judge John Rogers, QC, said that the gun - called a Maize gun because it was the sort made by prisoners in the Maize Prison during the Northern Ireland troubles - was a manufactured gun, made for one purposes only, for use in crime.

He said: "This is a criminal weapon and he is a criminal."

He warned that firearms in North Wales were unfortunately prevalent at present and the only mitigation in the case was that he had not committed a firearms offence before, although he had previous convictions for other offences.

The judge warned that if he had previous firearms convictions, the sentence would have been closer to ten years.

Gurney, of Trem-y-Gardden in Afoneitha, Wrexham, was convicted of having a prohibited weapon less than 24ins in length.

The prosecution said Gurney bent down while unloading the vehicle and the gun fell out, struck the ground and went off, hitting him in the face.

But he gave police a prepared state-ment in which he said that he heard footsteps to his left, turned around, heard a loud bang and then felt tremendous pain to his face.

Defending barrister Simon Medland told the jury that Gurney did not have the gun and he had never seen it before.

After the conviction, he stressed that there was no evidence that the defendant made the gun or that it had been used for any criminal purposes.